Happy St. Valentine’s Day

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Before the Church replaced the old pagan celebrations with a day honoring the martyred priest, St. Valentine, in the fifth century, February 14th was Lupercalia, the second day of the Roman festival to orgiastically invoke the powers of fertility and the Sabine festival of Februa, a time of purification and renewal. Celebratory activities included blood sacrifice, drunkenness, men running naked through the streets beating the woman they encountered with thongs made of goat skin and then drawing the names of unmarried girls to sleep with out of a container in the Juno Februata lottery.

With that in mind, don’t just settle for flowers and candy, have a spectacularly hedonistic Valentine’s Day. Just remember to use protection, unless you’re trying to harnes some of that ancient fertility magic.

Free MIT Electronics Class Online

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MIT is launching its first free, for credit course to be studied and assessed completely online. The BBC has a write up.

I’m excited about the platform and the class. I hope more are added soon.

The first class is Circuits and Electronics 6.002x, which will have the same content and professors as the on-campus version. If you’re interested, the class runs from March to June, about 10 hours per week. Info and enrollment on the MITx site.

They recommend that you have previously taken an AP level physics course, basic calculus and linear algebra. If you want to brush up, UC College Prep provides the materials for those classes online for free.

Freeware: Dystopian Action Short

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Visually stunning and action packed, Freeware is a 3-D, CG-animated thrill ride through a futuristic world. This sci-fi short follows three cyborgs on a daring race to rescue Maia, an assistant at a powerful IT company, from the grips of its evil CEO. All animation was created using Alias/Wavefronts Maya.

Director: Alex Orrelle
Producer: Mike Kaczmarek

This 2001 film is nothing new plot-wise: standard Hollywood-esque dystopian future, anti-corporate action film opening. Visually interesting and well put together though. The fast pace made following it a little challenging, but that’s understandable given the length.

I’d like to see more.

Karl Sims: Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994)

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In this 1994 short film, highlighting some of Karl Sims’ research results, virtual creatures, using an artificial neural network to process input from their virtual sensors, adapt to their environment and compete for genetic survival. Sims has performed significant research in artificial evolution and virtual creatures. His 1994 paper, “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition,” describes the competitive evolutionary system.

If you like artificial intelligence, art, or just enjoy laughing at locomotion-challenged block creatures, the film is worth a watch.

Black Out Your Facebook

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Black out Your Avatar

  1. Right-click on the first picture below, and select Save-As from the menu to download it.
  2. Go to Facebook and log in.
  3. Click your name at the top of the page.
  4. Hover over your profile picture using your mouse until a link appears labeled “Edit Profile picture.” Click the link.
  5. Select “Upload picture” from the menu, and upload one of the following images, or a Blackout-themed image of your own.
  6. Change your status to: “is blacked out: Stop SOPA and PIPA or the Internet really will go dark.”

    http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa

Black Out Your Cover Photo

  1. Click the the second picture below to view it full size. Right-click it, and select Save-As from the menu to download it.
  2. Go to Facebook and log in.
  3. Click your name at the top of the page to go to your timeline, or profile page.
  4. Click “Add a Cover.”
  5. Choose “Upload Photo…” Upload the image.
  6. Click on the image and drag it up or down until the text is all visible.
  7. Click “Save.”

Internet SOPA Protest Blackout

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This website be supporting the Internet Blackout tomorrow, 18 January, in protest of SOPA and PIPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. This protest also includes large sites like the English-language Wikipedia, I Can Has Cheeseburger, and Boing-Boing.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a list of reasons to oppose SOPA and PIPA.

The GIMP or Just GIMP?

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Wilber, a fox-like creature, with a paintbrush in his hand.

Wilber, the GIMP mascot.

I’ve always said “the GIMP” because that was what it called itself when I started using it, as you can see on the GIMP site archived from 1998 and the GIMP site archived from 2006, which makes sense, since it’s the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It looks like the Gimp.org site header changed in April 2006, so I guess it’s just GIMP now and I didn’t notice.

It would’ve been nice if they’d publicized the name change.

Dennis Ritchie’s Death

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Dennis Ritchie after being awarded the National Medal of Technology from Bill Clinton

National Medal of Technology winner, Dennis Ritchie.

I just found out a bit ago that Dennis Ritchie is dead. It was announced by his friend and colleague, Rob Pike, writer of the first windowing system for Unix and one of the creators of the Plan 9 operating system.

I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) died at home this weekend. I have no more information.

I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his contributions and mourn his passing appropriately.

He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind. (Source)

To say that we all owe this man a great debt for his work would be an understatement. He created the C programming language, which the kernels of Mac OS X, Windows and Linux are programmed in, and he was one of the creators of Unix, among other things. The influence of C and Unix are far-reaching. His work is inside your computer, your phone, your keyboard and your cable box. It is almost literally everywhere. His death is a great loss for computer science.

I’m not usually sentimental about celebrities, but I am truly saddened by his loss, and I wish that I had gotten to meet him.

For more information about his work, see Ritchie’s Wikipedia entry and his home page at Bell Labs.